I wrote “Faultlines” a little over four years ago, along with a few other demos, and then set it aside. Most of my music time and energy back then was invested in my band The Caulden Road. But over the years I kept humming this song to myself and decided this summer to finally get a small band together and record it. I’m happy I did as the resulting studio sessions surpassed the demo and turned out better than I could’ve imagined. I hope to work on a few more of those solo demos over the next few months, so stay tuned!

The single is backed with an unplugged version of “All I Am” (the studio version can be found on Reflexion)

This release is the second of seven new singles The Caulden Road is working on over the next year. If you’d like to help support these new releases, you can find our Patreon page here. Patreon supporters get behind the scenes updates from in the studio, early releases, and more goodies depending on their support tier.

Finally, I made lyric videos for “Shortwave, Pt. 1” which you can watch below.

The single is backed with a spoken word poetry track titled “If You Have Somewhere to Burn Them…” featuring actress Grace Gordon. You can read more about this piece here.

This release is the first of seven new singles The Caulden Road is working on over the next year. If you’d like to help support these new releases, you can find our Patreon page here. Patreon supporters get behind the scenes updates from in the studio, early releases, and more goodies depending on their support tier.

Finally, I made lyric videos for both “Erase This” and “If You Have Somewhere to Burn Them…”, which you can watch below.

Over the last few weeks The Caulden Road has been working on a new audio project with actress Grace Gordon. It’s a song/spoken word piece called “If You Have Somewhere to Burn Them…“

The song will be the b-side on our next single, “Erase This”, scheduled for release in the new year.

Grace Gordon in the studio

Grace has a rad vocal booth

“If You Have Somewhere to Burn Them…” began as a poem I wrote many years ago, and was the inspiration for the “Erase This” lyrics. I contacted Grace about working together on the spoken word aspect of the project after hearing her performance on the sci-fi podcast Satellite and seeing her in the indie short film Alone with Company.

Alan Lastufka in the studio

I wrote the backing music track and laid down a rough sketch, then sent that composition over to Grace. She then gave me seven different performances of the poem… one happy, one somber, one almost whispered, etc. I then comped those seven takes into one master performance.

I color-coded Grace’s different takes to make editing easier, which inadvertently made a wonderful Pride flag in Cubase.Putting the final touches on a rough mix.

Once I had the basic song developed, I sent the entire multitrack project over to Christian Caldeira (my producer and Caulden Road bandmate). He added a few layers of guitar, replaced my programmed synth bass with a real bass, and engineered the final mix.

Christian Caldeira on guitar.

Christian’s been using a lot more guitar pedals and other outboard gear in our sessions lately, relying more on capturing the right sound from the beginning and less on tinkering with plugins later.

This project is definitely the most experimental thing The Caulden Road has taken on so far, but I hope we tackle more stuff like this in the future. Pop rock songs are fun, but so is spoken word poetry!

I can’t wait to share our new songs with you in 2019! Until then, if you’d like more of these behind the scenes updates, you can support The Caulden Road over on our new Patreon page and get exclusive updates about the music we’re working on as we work on it!

My book is a horror/supernatural novel for adults. The main character, Adriana, is a single mother and police sketch artist who one day draws the wrong face. Adriana’s drawing is nothing like what the witness describes. Soon, that same wrong face is all she can draw. Who does this face belong to and why is it haunting her?! You’ll have to wait and read. 🙂

This edit is the first pass where we look at big picture things. Is this scene interesting? Is it easy to understand? Is everyone acting true to their character? Did they leave the house in the underwear they were wearing a moment ago, or did I put some clothes on them and just forget to mention it? (no really, that was one of Nicole’s notes)

Once all of that stuff is taken care of, we move on to line editing and copy editing. But that’s boring textbook stuff, right now it’s still fun story stuff!